Sunday, May 31, 2015

After
the success of Boule de Suif ("Ball
of Fat") in 1880, the touching
little story of the prostitute who reluctantly goes to bed with a Prussian
officer in order to procure the release of her traveling companions and then is
scorned by them, Guy de Maupassant began to write anecdotal articles for two
newspapers, the practice of which served as preparation for writing the short
stories that were to make him famous.

His
first full volume of short fiction appeared in 1881 under the title of his
second important story, La Maison Tellier
("Madame Tellier's House"), a comic piece about a group of
prostitutes who attend a First Communion. After the success of this book,
Maupassant published numerous stories in newspapers and periodicals which were
then reprinted in the volumes of his stories that began to appear at the rate
of approximately two a year. Many of his stories created a great deal of
controversy among the French critics of the time because he dared to focus on
the experiences of so-called "lowlife" characters.

However,
in addition to the realistic stories of the lower-class, Maupassant also
experimented with mystery tales, many of which are reminiscent of the stories
of Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of depending
on the supernatural, these stories focus on some mysterious dimension of
reality which is justified rationally by the central character. As a result, the reader is never quite sure
whether this realm exists in actuality or whether it is a product of the
obsessed mind of the narrator.

The
year 1884 saw the publication of Maupassant's most famous short story, La Parure, usually translated as
"The Necklace," which has become one of the most famous short stories
in any language. Indeed, it has become so famous that it is the story which
most commonly comes to mind when Maupassant's name is mentioned, in spite of
the fact that most critics agree that Maupassant's creation of tone and
character in such stories as Boule de
Suif and La MaisonTellier are much more representative of
his genius than this ironically-plotted little trick story about the woman who
wasted her entire life to pay back a lost necklace, only to discover that it
was fake.

La Horla, a story of psychological horror, is
actually the pinnacle of several stories of madness which Maupassant had
experimented with previously. The story
focuses on the central character's intuition of a reality which surrounds human
life but remains imperceptible to the senses.
Told by means of diary entries, the story charts the protagonist's
growing awareness of his own madness as well as his lucid understanding of the
process whereby the external world is displaced by psychic projections.

What
makes "The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator
to account for his madness as being due to something external to himself. Such a desire is Maupassant's way of
universalizing the story, for he well knew that human beings have always tried
to embody their most basic desires and fears in some external but invisible
presence. "The Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror
because it focuses so powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for
outer reality which is indeed the very basis of hallucination. The story is too
strongly controlled to be the work of a madman.

Of all the
Maupassant tales that focus on madness, hallucination, obsession, and the
mystery of a dimension beyond the senses, the most sustained and deservedly the
most famous is "The Horla."
Although many critics point to the autobiographical elements in this
story (for during its writing Maupassant was possessed by the increasing
madness caused by syphilis), still others suggest that the work stands on its
own merits as a masterpiece of psychological horror. Told by means of diary
entries, the story charts the protagonist's growing awareness of his own
madness as well as his understanding of the process whereby the external world
is displaced by psychic projections.

The story begins
with many of the same themes that Maupassant had earlier developed in
"Letter from a Madman," even at times using much of the same language
as that story. The narrator begins
considering the mystery of the invisible, the weakness of the senses to
perceive all that is out there in the world, and the theory that if there were
other senses, one could discover many more things about the world around human
life. The second predominant Maupassant
theme here is that of apprehension, a sense of some imminent danger, a
presentiment of something yet to come.
This apprehension, which the narrator calls a disease, is accompanied by
nightmares, a sense of some external force suffocating him while he sleeps, and
the conviction that there is something following him; yet when he turns around
there is nothing there.

This sense of
something existing outside the self but not visible to the ordinary senses is
pushed even further when the narrator begins to believe that there are actual
creatures who exist in this invisible dimension. This conviction is then developed into an
idea that when the mind is asleep an alien being takes control of the body and
makes it obey. All of these ideas then lead easily into the concept of
mesmerism or hypnotism; for under hypnosis it seems as if an alien being has
control of our actions which, when we awake, we have no awareness of. Although the narrator doubts his sanity, he
also feels he is in complete possession of all his faculties, and he becomes
even more convinced that an invisible creature is making him do things that his
own mind does not direct him to do. Thus
he finally believes that there are Invisible Ones in the world, creatures who
have always existed and who have haunted mankind even though they cannot be
seen.

The final event
to convince him of the external, as opposed to the psychological, existence of
the creatures, is a newspaper article about an epidemic of madness in Brazil in
which people seem possessed by vampire-like creatures who feed on them during
sleep. He remembers a Brazilian ship
that sailed past his window and believes that one of the creatures has jumped
ship to possess him. Now he knows that
the reign of man on earth is over and that the forces of the Horla which man
has always feared--forces called spirits, genii, fairies, hobgoblins, witches,
devils, and imps--will enslave man.

Finally, in a
scene which was used earlier in "A Letter from a Madman," he
"sees" the creature in the mirror when its presence blurs his own
image by coming between him and the mirror. He decides to destroy the creature
by locking it in his room and burning his house to the ground. As he watches
the house burn and realizes that his servants are burning too, he wonders if
indeed the Horla is dead, for he considers that it cannot, like man, be prematurely
destroyed. His final thought is since
the Horla is not dead he shall have to kill himself; the story ends with that
decision.

What makes
"The Horla" distinctive is the increasing need of the narrator to
account for his madness as being something external to himself. This universalizes the story, for human
beings have always tried to embody their most basic desires and fears in some
external but invisible presence named gods, devils, spirits, etc. "The
Horla" is a masterpiece of hallucinatory horror because it focuses so
powerfully on that process of mistaking inner reality for outer reality which
is the very basis of hallucination.

Because of his
ability to transform the short mystery tale from a primitive oral form based on
legend into a sophisticated modern form in which mystery originates within the
complex mind of man, Maupassant is an important figure in marking the
transition between the nineteenth-century tale of the supernatural and the
twentieth-century short story of psychological obsession.

Guy
de Maupassant is one of those writers whose contribution to literature is often
overshadowed by the tragic facts of his life and whose real experimentation is
often ignored in favor of his more popular innovations. Too often it is his promiscuity and
profligate Parisian life style that receives the most attention from the casual
reader. As if to provide evidence for
the payment Maupassant had to make for such a lifestyle, these readers then
point to the supposed madness-inspired story
La Horla--a fit ending for one who not only wrote about prostitutes but
paid for their dangerous favors as well with his life.

However,
Maupassant's real place as a writer belongs with such innovators of the
short-story form as Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Ambrose Bierce, and O.
Henry. Too often, whereas such writers
as Turgenev and Chekhov are admired for their so-called lyricism and realistic
vignettes, writers such as Bierce and O. Henry are scorned for their so-called
cheap narrative tricks. Maupassant falls
somewhere in between. On the one hand,
he indeed mastered the ability to create the tight little ironic story that
depends, as all short stories do, on the impact of the ending, but on the other
hand he also had the ability, like Chekhov, to focus keenly on a limited number
of characters in a luminous situation. The Soviet short-story writer Isaac
Babel has perhaps paid the ultimate tribute to Maupassant in one of his stories
by noting how Maupassant knew the power of a period placed in just the right
place.

Maupassant
had as much to do with the development of the short-story genre in the late
nineteenth century Chekhov did. in somewhat different ways. However, because such stories as "The
Necklace" seem so deceptively simple and trivial, his experiment with the
form has often been ignored. Not until
the short story itself receives the recognition it deserves as a respectable
literary genre will Guy de Maupassant receive the recognition he deserves for
his contribution to the perfection of the form.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

As
Eudora Welty once said, "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the
last to see mystery again. Every good
story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is
likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows
more beautiful" (164). The implication of this awareness of “mystery” is
that the short story often seems to focus on a moment out of time, or on time
as mythically perceived, the way Ernest Cassirer and Mircea Eliade have described
it.

More so than in the novel, the short story
most often deals with phenomena for which there is no clearly discernible
logical, sociological, or psychological cause.
As Welty says, the "first thing we notice about our story is that
we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of
its own. It is wrapped in an
atmosphere. This is what makes it shine,
perhaps, as well as what initial obscures its plain, real shape"
(163). To Conrad’s Marlowe, sitting
Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” the
"meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in
the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."

Joseph Conrad confronts the
problem of manifesting the secret, hidden life in the external world explicitly
in his two most famous short works. In
"The Heart of Darkness" he creates a world like that of "Young
Goodman Brown," in which landscape symbolically represents the ultimate
reaches of psychic reality; moreover he develops a plot structure very much
like Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Melville's "Bartleby
the Scrivener," in which a realistic narrator confronts a metaphoric
extremist

In
"The Secret Sharer," Conrad seeks a method to reveal the secret
conflict of his protagonist by having the young captain project that conflict
outside of himself. Just as Hamlet
creates a play within a play to externalize his conflict so that he can cope
with it, the captain in Conrad's story creates the character of Leggatt to
provide him with the means by which he can deal with his own insecurity and
establish his own identity. Conrad
pushes to metaphoric extremes the common psychological phenomenon of inner
conflict creating a split in the self so that it seems as if there are two
separate voices engaged in a dialogue.

Leggatt,
whose name suggests he is a representative or emissary, is the objectified side
of the captain's Hamlet-like, preoccupied, subjective self. The story thus is torn between the plot,
which focuses on the efforts of the captain to protect and conceal the
mysterious stranger, and the mind of the captain, which obsessively persists in
perceiving and describing the stranger as his other self, his double. Although some critics have suggested that the
constant repetition of the similarity between the captain and Leggatt is
tedious and the weakest part of the work, the repetition is a purposeful Conrad
tactic of overdetermination to suggest both that Leggatt is a romance-like
symbolic projection of the captain's psyche and at the same time a real
character with his own objective existence to whom the captain reacts in an
obsessive way.

The story begins with the central motif of the
captain's lack of identity. He says he
is not only a stranger on the ship but also a stranger to himself, and he
wonders if he will "turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's
own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." And indeed, many
metaphorical details in the story suggest Leggatt has been summoned forth from
the captain's unconscious as an aspect of the self with which he must deal.

For example, Leggatt is first seen as a silvery,
fish-like naked body emerging from the sea to whom the captain responds in a
matter-of-fact way, as if he were expecting him. The image of the captain looking straight
down into a face upturned exactly under his own is clearly an allusion to the
myth of Narcissus. However, instead of
the captain falling into his reflection, as in a number of German romantic
tales, the reflection comes out of the mirror-like sea and takes on a
problematical independent existence.
After Leggatt puts on one of the captain's sleeping suits, the captain
says, it was "as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the
depths of a somber and immense mirror."

In
Conrad's story the mysterious mythic emissary from the unconscious is presented
as an objective existence in the world, not as a dreamlike or allegorical
projection. Although we know that others
have seen Leggatt as an objective presence before the story begins, no one but
the captain sees him during the actual events of the story. The anecdote of the scorpion in the inkwell
is the mise en abyme in "The Secret Sharer" in which we see
the entire story reflected in miniature.
Leggatt comes out of the inky water of the sea, which represents both
the unconscious of the captain/Conrad and the inkwell source of all stories,
the Ocean of Story. At the end of
"The Secret Sharer," Leggatt's movement back into the sea,
representing the captain's reintegration of the split in his self, is his
movement back into the inkwell. Leggatt,
the oneiric creation of both the captain and the artist, says "I am off
the face of the earth now. As I came at
night so shall I go."

Making
manifest that which is hidden is the primarily structural force of "The
Secret Sharer." This
objectification of inner reality marks the beginning of the “modern” mythical
method of fictional narration, as Thomas Mann defines it in his famous essay,
"Freud and the Future." Mann
explicitly calls for a modern fiction that mixes the psychological and the
mythical, for he affirms as truth the Schopenhauer‑Freud perception that life
itself is a "mingling of the individual elements and the formal stock‑in‑trade;
a mingling in which the individual, as it were, only lifts his head above the
formal and impersonal elements."
Much of the "extra‑personal," Mann insists, "much
unconscious identification, much that is conventional and schematic, is none
the less decisive for the experience not only of the artist but of the human
being in genera. (421)."

Our
interest in fictional characters, Mann implies, is, regardless of the events in
which they are enmeshed, always centrally located in the process by which they
try to find their identity, the means by which they attempt to answer the age‑old
Oedipal question: Who am I? In such a process the two forces of the
subjective and the schematic are decisive.
As Robert Langbaum has described it, when you realize that introspection
leads to nothing but endless reflection, you see that the only way to find out
who you are is to don a mask and step into a story. "The point is," says Langbaum,
"at that level of experience where events fall into a pattern. . . they
are an objectification of your deepest will, since they make you do things
other than you consciously intend; so that in responding like a marionette to
the necessities of the story, you actually find out what you really want and
who you really are" (175).

This creation
of an "as-if" real character to embody psychic processes marks the
impressionistic extension of the romantic trend that began the short story form
earlier in the nineteenth century.

Much
of the reason for this sense of an elusive and mysterious “secret” life of the
characters of short stories derives from its origins in the folk tale and later
the romance form. Whereas the focus of
the novel is often on multiple inner consciousnesses, the focus of the short story
is more often on an obsessed inner consciousness. Characters in short fiction seem somewhat
like allegorical figures because of their obsessive focus on some single task:
Goodman Brown's journey into the forest, Old Phoenix's trip to get the healing medicine,
Bartleby's preference not to, Nick Adam's fishing trip at Big, Two-Hearted
River. The hidden story of emotion and
secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood is always about
something more unspeakable, more mysterious, than the story generated by the
reader’s focus on characters and on what happens next.

The
genius of the short story form is that whereas short stories often could indeed be the
seedbeds of novels, they do not communicate as novels do. And if we try to read them as if they were
novels, they will never haunt us with their sense of that mysterious secret
life within all of us.

Friday, May 29, 2015

O. Henry poses the same problem for a history of the
short story as Bret Harte does, for as with Harte, O. Henry's influence far
exceeds his excellence as a short-story writer.
However, like Harte, O. Henry was the right man at the right time, a
writer who pushed the well-made formal nature of the short story to its
furthest extreme. O. Henry--a local
colorist writer focusing on the city of New York who so emphasized the ironic
pattern of his stories that his name has become associated with the formulaic short
story. O. Henry's popularity and his
output was unprecedented. By l920,
nearly five million copies of his books were sold in the U.S. Ironically, while he was being scolded by
the serious critics in America, who preferred the more serious slice- of-life
stories of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in Russia, serious critics were
praising O. Henry for his mastery of the complex conventions of story-telling.

With O. Henry, the endings of stories became a
formalization of the kind of ironic reversals that Boccaccio had made popular
during the Renaissance. Boris Ejxenbaum
was one of the first critics to recognize that what O. Henry had discovered was
something about the short story that was unique and characteristic of the
form. In his brief study, O. Henry
and the Theory of the Short Story, he argued that the short story and the
novel were not only different but inherently at odds, for while the novel is a
syncretic form developed from collections or stories or complicated by manners
and morals material, the short story is a fundamental or elementary form. The difference between the two is a
difference in essence, said Exjenbaum, a difference conditioned by the
distinction between big and small forms.
Admittedly basing his analysis largely on the stories of O. Henry, he
argued that the story was constructed on the basic of some contradiction or
incongruity whereby, by itself very essence the story amassed its whole weight
toward its ending.

As Eichenbaum has said, there is something of the
structure of the joke about short stories in that they depend on the
ending. However, the question here is
why did Chekhov move away from the snappy ending while O. Henry continued to
make it his forte? This may be an
example of the usual prejudice against the short story or else a
misunderstanding of what constitutes its basic nature. There is obviously some
relationship between the structure of the short story and the structure of the
joke, but there is obviously an important difference. What needs to be distinguished is the basic
underlying structure of the joke (Freud may be the best help for this, as well
as Koestler and other students of creativity) and the use of this structure for
more serious material. Mickey Spillane
once said that the only reason people listen to a joke or read a story is to find
out how it ends. Thus jokes are closed forms with a punch line, whereas the
open short story (like Eastman's notion of open parable) does not focus on
closure in the traditional sense. I must
check Kermode here on the notion of endings.

O. Henry wrote so many short stories so rapidly that
he became the quintessential example of Edward O'Brien's accusation that the
short story had become a machine-made product.
However, his best-known stories are those that reflect the kind of
reverse ending that he was famous for: "The Gift of the Magi,"
"Mammon and the Archer," "The Cop and the Anthem,"
"The Furnished Room" and "A Municipal Report," perhaps his
most respected story. O. Henry is the
writer with which Frederick Pattee ends his class history of the development of
the short story, Pattee citing him as the master of "That reminds me of
another" story, but a writer, for all his smooth slick style, of no depth,
no thought, no philosophy, no moral complexity.
The problem of O. Henry is that he is a master of technique, and to cite
him as a representative short story writer is simply to say that technique is
more important for the short story than them.
This does not mean, however, that there is no thematic/structural
complexity in O. Henry's stories, as a brief look at "The Cop and the
Anthem" will show.

At the turn
of the century the name O. Henry was synonymous with the short story as a
form. And for many readers still, the
notion of what a short story is derives from the kind of trick or twist ending
associated with such O. Henry stories as "The Gift of the Magi," that
sentimental story about the poor young couple--he who sold his watch to buy
combs for her long hair and she who sold her hair to a wig-maker to buy a chain
for his gold watch. Not many O. Henry
stories deal with serious issues in a serious way; they are either sentimental
or else they are comically ironic.
"The Cop and the Anthem" is of the latter kind, but just
because it does not carry a heavy theme or a serious idea does not mean that it
will not repay a close study.

"The Cop and the Anthem" can be used to
make students sensitive to the importance of point of view and ironic
structure. The first thing students
might notice about this story is the language, riddled as it is with
high-sounding esoteric words. Students
might be asked to characterize someone who says "cognizant of the fact
that" rather than "knew," or "eleemosynary" rather
than "charitable." The
technique O. Henry uses here is to give the storyteller language typical of the
central character, Soapy, the bum, as a way of mildly ironically mocking
him. The language makes Soapy sound
important, and indeed the irony of his character and situation is that although
he is a bum, he acts as if he is of a high social status.

Indeed the character of Soapy is as important to
this story as its ironic structure, in which every action that he takes creates
a reaction opposite to the one he wishes.
The basic irony of the story is that as long as Soapy is "free,"
that is, loose in the city, he is not free at all, because of the coming
winter. However, if he were in prison,
he would indeed be "free" to enjoy life without fear. However, Soapy does not want something for
nothing; he is willing to pay for his room and board by going to some effort to
commit an act that, according to the law, will get him in jail. He knows that what society calls charity is
not charity at all, but that he will have to "pay" for philanthropy
by being preached at and lectured to.

The additional problem, of course, is that although
Soapy breaks the law, he does not act like a criminal. Moreover, although Soapy tries to be a
"crook" there are real crooks out there, such as the umbrella thief,
who thwart him, for he finds he cannot really steal from one who has already
stolen. Finally, there are those, such
as the streetwalker, who although they might not look as if they were outside
the law, are indeed criminals; one cannot violate the legal rights of one who
is outside the law.

Thus, Soapy seems "doomed to
liberty." Of course, a story with
an ironic, mocking tone such as this one, in which a bum who talks like a
gentleman tries to get himself thrown into jail but continually fails, can only
end one way. The ultimate irony of
course is that Soapy, who does not want something for nothing and who goes to a
great deal to get thrown into jail, finally does get thrown into jail for doing
precisely nothing.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

In Ireland, the beginnings of the modern short story
is credited to George Moore. Such
critics of the short story as H. E. Bates and Frank O'Connor have both
suggested that the modern Irish short story begins with Moore, particularly in
l903 with the publication of The Untilled Field. Many critics have agreed with Moore's own
typically immodest assessment that the book was a "frontier book, between
the new and the old style" of fiction. Letter of March l, l9l5, to Edmund
Gosse. Moore felt that The Untilled
Field was his best work, boasting that he wrote the stories to be models
for young Irish writers in the future.

And indeed as many critics have suggested, the book
had an influence on the collection of short stories that has become perhaps the
most influential short story collection in the 20th century, James Joyce's Dubliners. As Graham Hough has suggested, although no
writer has carried farther than Joyce "a dual allegiance to an exhaustive
naturalism on the one hand and a complex aesthetic symbolism on the other.... Dubliners
has an obvious ancestor in Moore's stories in The Untilled Field."

However, no one has really looked very carefully at
the nature of Moore's short stories, especially in such a way as to suggest how
they are so typical of the short story genre.
One can certainly agree with Hough and others that the stories seem
unique for their time in combining the content of French naturalism with the
concern for style of the fin de siecle aesthetics; however, this does
not really give us a means by which to approach the individual stories. For there is another important element about
Moore's short stories which contributes to their story nature--that is, their
allegiance to the folk tale form.
"Art begins in the irresponsible imaginations of the people,"
said Moore in Avowals, and "as literature rises out of speech it
must always retain the accent of speech."

Moreover, no one has looked very closely at another
aspect of Moore's view of story, that is, his notion that reality itself must
be understood by means of story. In
"Recollections" and "Thoughts" about Moore, both John
Eglinton and W. B Yeats suggest that
Moore felt he could understand a subject if he could see it as
"story." Eglinton says that Moore felt he possessed a special faculty
of this sort that distinguished him from others, and Yeats adds that he would
do anything to make "his audience believe that the story running in his
head at the moment had happened, had only just happened."

This allegiance to the folk tale form, the primal
origins of story itself, and this need to understand reality by means of story
can be clearly seen in one of Moore's best-known and most anthologized stories
from The Untilled Field--"Julia Cahill's Curse." "Julia Cahill's Curse" is a slight
piece, but a fairly clear example of Moore's effort to use the folk tale mode
as a means to understand social reality.
The basic situation is that of a story being told by a driver to the
first-person narrator, who hearing the name, Julia Cahill, urges the driver to
tell him her story. The story, which
indeed constitutes the bulk of "Julia Cahill's Curse," is of an event
that took place twenty years previous when the Priest Father Madden had Julia
put out of the parish, and consequently Julia put a curse on the parish that
every year a roof would fall in and a family would go to America. The basic conflict in the tale is between
Julia, who in her dancing and courting, represents free pagan values, and the
Priest, who, in his desire to restrain Julia, represents church control of such
freedom.

After preaching in church that Julia is the evil
spirit that makes men mad, Father Madden threatens to change Julia's father
into a rabbit if he does not turn her out.
The teller of the tale has no verification of the Priest's words, since
all those who were in church that day have either died or gone to America, nor
does he have anything more than hearsay that Julia was seen raising her arms to
the sky to curse the village; however,
as the teller and listener near the village itself and the listener sees the
ruins of the houses, the listener reflects, "I could see he believed the
story, and for the moment I, too, believed in an outcast Venus becoming the
evil spirit of a village that would not accept her as divine."

The conflict between Julia and the priest is clear
enough; however it is the relationship between the teller and the listener that
constitutes the structural interest of the story, for what the tale is really
about is the nature of story used to understand social reality. What we have here is an actual event of
social reality that has been mythicized by the teller and thus by the village
folk both to explain and to justify the breakdown of Irish parish life in the
late nineteenth century. The teller of
the tale believes that the desertion of the parish is due to Julia's
curse. The listener of the tale does not
believe in the curse in this literal way but, as he says, for the moment he too
believes it, at least in some way that is not made explicit. It is the nature of the belief that
constitutes the difference and thus the significance of the story. Whereas the folk may believe such a tale
literally, the modern listener believes it in a symbolic way. And indeed, what Moore does here is to
present a story that is responded to within the story itself in both the old
way and the new way, that is, as a literal story of magic and as a symbolic story
to account for the breakdown of the parish life--the tension between pagan freedom and Church control. Thus, "Julia Cahill's Curse" is a
clear example of Moore's use of story to understand social reality.

Frank O'Connor singles out "Home Sickness"
as representative of the direction that the Irish short story would take in the
twentieth century, arguing that it has the "absolute purity of the short
story as opposed to the tale" (37).
Although O'Connor says that as a piece of artistic organization,
"Home Sickness" is perfect, one's first impression of the story is of
its structural simplicity. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant who works in a bar
in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland "in search of health," and for a
short time considers marrying a peasant girl and remaining there. What unifies the story beyond its simple
narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone throughout of
Bryden's detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live
within a sort of reverie of nostalgia which he is disappointed to find
unrealized in reality. He takes no interest in the life of the people and does
not so much decide to marry Margaret Dirken as he passively allows the
impending marriage to be announced.

Although Bryden finds himself longing for the Bowery
as he contrasts the "weakness and incompetence of the people around him
with the modern restlessness and cold energy of the people he left behind
him," and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk
who cling to religious authority as his reason to return to America; the
conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by unifying
the detached dream-like mood of reverie that has been counterpointed throughout
against Irish village reality. For the story is truly about the unbridgeable
gap between restless reality and dream-like memory.

The style of the story shifts in the penultimate
paragraph from what at first seems like a straightforward realistic
presentation of Bryden's detached disappointment with Irish life to a
compressed summary account of his ordinary and uneventful life in America. After his wife has died and his children are
married, he sits in front of the fire, an old man, and "a vague, tender
reverie" of Margaret floats up to his consciousness. "His wife and children passed out of
mind, and it seemed to him that a memory was the only real thing he possessed,
and the desire to see Margaret again grew intense."

The final lyrical paragraph of the story seems in
sharp contrast to the realistic style of what has preceded it, in a way that is
very similar to the contrast between
realism and concluding lyricism that characterizes Joyce's "The
Dead": "There is an
unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his
unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that
concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and
the bog lake and the rushes around it, and the greater lake in the distance,
and behind it the blue line of wandering hills."

However, as
in "The Dead," the concluding lyrical style is not so much in
contrast to the former style of the story as it first appears, for what Moore
has accomplished is what characterizes the so-called "modern" style
of Chekhov, Anderson, and Joyce. What
seems to be mere verisimilitude in the story actually is a subtle development
of a unified tone of reverie and memory that dominates over the description of
everyday reality. Although the story on
the surface seems to focus on external reality, the real emphasis, as is so
often the case with Chekhov and Joyce, is on inner life, for which the details
of external reality are significant either only by contrast or as images of subjective
reality. Although the concluding
revelation of the "unchanging, silent life" of Bryden at first seems
unprepared for, much as the lyrical evocation of Gabriel's life does in
"The Dead," a closer look at the story reveals that the entire story
is dominated by images that suggest the predominance of the subjective life of
reverie and imagination over the ordinary life of the everyday.

This typically modern theme of presenting the
predominance of the inner life of imagination over that of the everyday can be
seen in almost a paradigmatic form in "The Clerk's Quest." Edward
Dempsey, the "obscure, clandestine, taciturn" little clerk, is the
quintessential embodiment of what Frank O'Connor has called the "little
man" who has predominated in the short story form since Gogol's Akakey
Akakeivitch and Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. The story is similar to the tales of the
break up of ordinary reality so favored by Chekhov as well as the stories of the
lonely little man possessed by an inner secret life frequently developed by
Sherwood Anderson.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Most often Saki's stories are discussed as satires,
a focus which both Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett insist upon in their
well-known essays on Saki's work.
Pritchett says that Saki belongs to the early period of the sadistic
reversal in English comic and satiric writing, a period when the chief target
was the "cult of convention." And Greene notes that Saki only
satirizes those who deserve no sympathy.
Like a chivalrous highwayman, says Greene, he only robs from the
rich. However, no one has discussed the
typical structure of Saki's use the story-telling theme. Because Saki marks a shift in Edwardian short
fiction to the trick ending story that dominates popular short stories both in
England and America at the turn of the century, his stories often focus on the
nature of story itself.

Saki's
most anthologized story, "The Open Window," is a clear example of a
fiction that depends for its impact on the means by which story itself
works. Frampton Nuttel goes to the
country for his health and calls at the home of a woman wo whom his sister has
referred him. While waiting for the
woman, Nuttel hears a story from the niece about a great tragedy that occurred
three years earlier when the aunt's husband and her two younger brothers went
hunting and were lost in a bog. Just as
the niece tells Nuttel that the aunt keeps the window open for the men in case
they should return, the aunt enters for desultory conversation until quite
expectantly she sees the three men coming in toward the window. Nuttel, terrified of what he himself sees as
ghosts, bolts out, at which point the young girl establishes the true situation
by beginning a story which Nuttel has supposedly told her about a pack of
pariah dogs which frightened him in a cemetery on the banks of the Ganges. The
punchline from Saki is: "Romance at short notice was her specialty."

"The Open Window" is a particularly clear
example of foregrounding the process of story, for what makes it work is
Nuttel's uncertainty about the nature of the story Vera tells and the reader's
uncertanity about the nature of the story Saki writes. Our first response is to take Vera's story as
truth; we have no more means than Nuttel does, to determine it is not. When Mrs. Sappelton enters and rattles on
about her husband going snipe hunting, both the reader and Nuttel begin to
think that they are involved in a bit of harmless madness.

However, when Nuttel looks out the window and sees
the three men, the reader's apprehension of the story shifts to a conviction
that it is a conventional ghost story.
It is only when Vera begins her next tale that the reader knows that
Nuttel and the reader have been made the butt of Saki's story-made joke. Vera
is indeed the typical Saki artist who manipulates the reader into various
possibilities about the genre of the story only to reveal that it is about the
process of turning fantasy into supposed fact, only to reveal it as fantasy
after all. For Frampton Nuttel, the
story becomes a reality to which he cannot passively respond, but which
involves him by actually threatening to enter the world he occupies. It works similarly
for the reader until, in a gesture that lays bare what always underlies story,
Saki makes clear that what we took to be real is only imagination, that is,
story itself.

Romance at short notice is also the specialty of the
bachelor in the train car in "The Story-Teller," a typical Saki
persona. Becoming tired of the
children's noise and the ineffectual aunt who tries to entertain them with a
moral story about a good little girl, the bachelor tells them a story about
a little girl who is "horribly
good," a detail which the children feel has the ring of truth about
it. As the story proceeds, prompted by
questions from the children, it is clear that the bachelor, in typical
fairy-tale fashion, is extemporizing, moving freely in response to the questions
themselves. The crux of the story is
that Bertha, a little girl who has many medals for her goodness, is allowed to
go into a special park which no other children are permitted to enter. While there, she is chased by a wolf and
hides in the bushes, but her medals clink together and reveal her hiding place,
and the wolf eats up her to the last morsel.
The children say the story has a beautiful ending, that in fact it is
the most beautiful ending they have ever heard, even the only beautiful story
they have ever heard. Although the aunt
scolds him for telling the children an improper story that will undermine years
of careful teaching, the bachelor replies that at least it kept them quiet for
ten minutes. He leaves amused that the
aunt will be assailed in public by the children for the next six months by demands
for an improper story.

The point of the story is the story itself, of
course, for Saki here makes it clear that story does not exist for the sake of
a moral lesson, but rather for the delight it gives in reversing one's usual
expectations. The story the bachelor
tells fulfills the unconscious expectations of the children even as it defeats
the conscious expectations of the conventional moral tale that begins
"Once there was a little girl who was extraordinarily good." The bachelor's tale is truly more properly a
fairy tale than the moral tale the aunt tells.
As Bruno Bettleheim has recently suggested, fairy tales fulfill the
unconscious demands of children that they are not outcasts because of their own
unconscious and often forbidden desires.
Such stories, says Bettleheim, are more valuable for children than the
moral stories of everyday reality that are often told to them by adults, for
they objectify unconscious desires. "The Story-Teller" embodies the
basic nature of both the method and the motivation for fairy tale itself.

"Sredni Vashtar" is the quintessential
Saki story about the romancer who makes his imagination become real; however,
the tone of this story is more serious than "The Open Window," for
more is at stake here. The protagonist
is a ten-year-old boy who is only given five more years to live. But his illness has a metaphorical significance, for it is
the illness of being forced by the real world to give up his world of
imagination. The embodiment of the
threat to his imagination is Mrs. De Ropp, his cousin and guardian, who
"the three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and
real." Conradin sees the other
two-fifths summed up in himself and his imagination. Although Conradin knows that one day he will
have to succumb to the pressure of necessary things such as restrictions and
dullness, he also knows that without his imagination, born of his loneliness he
would have succumbed long ago.

Like all adults, Mrs. De Ropp is only concerned with
what is for Conradin's own good, but her pleasure in thwarting him is only
matched by his hatred for her. Thus, he
locks her out of his imagination as something unclean. As is typical of Saki's children, Conradin has
his hiding place from external reality--a tool shed where he keeps his two
pets, a hen and a polecat-ferret. The
tool-shed is both playroom and cathedral, which Conradin peoples with creatures
of his own imagination. The ferret
becomes the central figure in the cathedral, a creature that Conradin both
intensely fears and treasures. By naming
it Sredni Vashtar he transforms it into a god and his relationship to it into a
religion. Conradin's religion, rather
than being the passive religion of Christianity, represents the "fierce
impatient side of things."

When Mrs. De Ropp, unaware of the existence of the
ferret, has the hen sold, Conradin asks a boon of his god, that it do one thing
for him, although he does not specify what that thing is. As Mrs. De Ropp, whom Conradin refers to
simply as "the Woman," continues her persecution of him, she goes to
the tool shed to see what else he is hiding there. Conradin continues to pray his prayer for a
boon from Sredni Vashtar, but he believes that the Woman, representing external
adult reality, will win as she always does.
He chants when she goes to his playhouse, and when she does not come
out, hope and triumph begin to creep into his heart. Presently the animal comes out with dark
stains around its jaws and throat; it goes to the stream, drinks, and then
crosses the bridge and is seen no more: "Such was the passing of Sredni
Vashtar." Later when the maid discovers the body of Mrs. De Ropp and
wonders who will break it to the poor child, Conradin makes himself another
piece of toast.

It is obvious that plot and tone are everything in
Saki's stories. Character is limited to
embodiments of a dichotomy between the child-like world, which is the world of
story and the imagination, and the adult world, which is the world of reality
and control. For Saki, as for the short
story form generally, it is the world of imagination that triumphs over the
world of external reality. "Sredni
Vashtar" is a particularly sardonic version of the kind of story that
Conrad Aiken later tells in "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," or that Poe
earlier told in "The Fall of the House of Usher." It is a story about imagination predominating over the reality of the
every-day world. What makes this
particular story somewhat different from the other Saki stories is not only the
horror of the final end of the hated Woman, for that is surely a
wish-fulfillment we can accept as such; rather it is the ambiguous nature of
her end. The ferret is surely real, but
it has been transformed by Conradin into a creature of his own imagination that
acts out and objectifies his wishes--truly an example of the god-like magic
power of primitive and child-like belief. Such is the romantic and primitive
notion that dominates the short-story form throughout the nineteenth century.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Much of the negative criticism that Rudyard
Kipling's fiction has received is precisely the same kind of criticism that has
often been lodged against the short story form in general--for example, that it
focuses only on episodes, that it is too concerned with technique, that it is
too dependent on tricks, and that it often lacks a moral force.

Henry James noted that the young Kipling realized
very early the uniqueness of the short story, seeing what chances the form
offered for "touching life in a thousand different places, taking it up in
innumerable pieces, each a specimen and an illustration. In a word, he appreciates the episode"
(l8). However, it is just this appreciation for the episode, according to Edmund
Wilson, that prevented Kipling from becoming a great novelist: "You can
make an effective short story, as Kipling so often does, about somebody's
scoring off somebody else; but this is not enough for a great novelist, who
must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic
impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another."

Moreover, it is not simply because Kipling could not
"graduate," as it were, to the novel that critics have found fault
with him. Frank O'Connor confesses his
embarrassment in discussing Kipling's stories in comparison with storytellers
like Chekhov and Maupassant, for he feels that Kipling has too much
consciousness of the individual reader as an audience who must be affected. C.
S. Lewis also recoiled from Kipling for similar reasons. Complaining about what he calls the excess of
Kipling's art, he cites how constantly shortened and honed his stories by
blotting out passages with Indian ink.
Ultimately, says Lewis, the story is often shortened too much and as a
result "the style tends to be too continuously and obtrusively
brilliant" with no "leisureliness."

This criticism is similar to Edmund Wilson's, for it
suggests displeasure with Kipling's stories because they do not follow the same
assumptions as the novel. Lionel
Trilling notes that the words "craft" and "craftily" are
Kipling's favorites, and Wilson says that it is the paradox of his career that
he "should have extended the conquests of his craftsmanship in proportion
to the shrinking of the range of his dramatic imagination. As his responses to human beings became
duller, his sensitivity to his medium increased."

Such remarks indicate a failure to make generic
distinctions between the nature of the novel and the nature of the short story;
they either ignore or fail to take seriously Stevenson's realization that the
tale form does not focus on character, but rather on fable, on the meaning of
an episode in an ideal form. Bonamy
Dobree has noted this fabular aspect of Kipling's stories, suggesting that as
Kipling's mastery of the short story form increased, he became more and more
inclined to introduce an element of fable.
"Great realist as he was, it is impossible to see what he was
really saying unless the fabular element is at least glimpsed." However,
the fabular element, so common to the short story form, often is criticized as
being limiting in Kipling, as indeed over the years it has been a central cause
of criticism of short fiction generally.
For example, W. W. Robson has suggested that Kipling's desire to have
complete possible control of his form and medium, while it can lead to
impressive achievements in fantasy and fable, "can also lead to a
simplification and distortion of human character" (260).

Such a judgment assumes that human character in
fiction is constituted solely of conduct, that character is created and
revealed by the actions of man in time and space, in the real world. And indeed, such an assumption is typical of
the expectations we have about character in the novel form. However, such need not be an assumption of
character in the short story. As Isak
Dinesen has suggested in "The First Cardinal's Tale," the tale or
short story form is one that focuses on an idealization-- not man and woman
seen as they are in the everyday world, but rather transformed by the role they
play in the story itself. In the short
story, it is the fable that is the
focus; the characters exist for the sake of the story rather than the story
existing for the sake of the characters.

I do not claim that Kipling's stories are not highly
crafted, that they do not involve unrealistic character, that they do not
depend on tricks. For in many ways, they
must stand guilty of such charges. What I do wish to suggest is that such
charges are not necessarily damaging, for they indicate that Kipling was
perhaps the first English writer to embrace the characteristics of the short
story form whole-heartedly, and that thus his stories are perfect
representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the
nineteenth century and the modern short story--a transition, however, which
Joseph Conrad, because of the profundity of his vision, perhaps was better able
to make than Kipling

.Kipling's most famous story, "The Gardener," depends
on concealment of an inner life for its effect,
and a split between external reality and a tenuous inner reality. Both Edmund Wilson and Frank O'Connor call
"The Gardner" Kipling's best story, even a masterpiece, but, as so
often the case with Kipling criticism, they do so with reservations. Edmund Wilson believes that the story is not
of the highest quality because of the fairy tale properties of the ending. O'Connor also has serious reservations about
the conclusion of the story when Helen goes to the cemetery to visit the grave
of her illegitimate son and meets a man she supposes to be the gardener, thus
echoing the mistake of Mary Magdalene when she goes to the tomb and meets
Jesus.

The impact of the conclusion of the tale depends, of
course, on the fact that Kipling has concealed the truth about the boy being
Helen's son throughout the story.
O'Connor accepts the argument that such a concealment might be justified
by the fact that Helen herself has concealed this knowledge from the village,
but still he does not believe that this rescues the story. O'Connor says that
had he written the story he would have revealed the illegitimacy at the
beginning. The result would be to remove
the story from the world of celestial gardeners and place it in the real world,
thus indicating throughout that the story is one of Helen's heroism in bringing
the child home in the first place (l0l-l03).

Eliot Gilbert has tackled these objections to the
story directly and has suggested that Kipling is not guilty of trickery here,
but instead has concealed the facts of Helen's case as an essential echo of the
theme of concealment which prepares the reader to experience the same shock
that Helen does at the end. He argues
that the supernatural ending "represents the final intensification of the
author's vision, too compressed and cryptic to find expression within the
realistic framework of the rest of the tale." However, as excellent as Gilbert's discussion
is in rescuing the story, it still would not dismiss O'Connor's misgivings, nor
does it clearly explain why Kipling's vision requires the so-called
supernatural conclusion.

The basic technique of the story depends on a gap
between details that are "public property," that is, details which
the village is aware of and which in turn the reader knows, and unwritten details
which are private property, known only to Helen herself. What is public is a lie and what is private
is the truth; furthermore, what is ugly in the public eye is revealed as
beautiful in the eye of the reader at the conclusion. The basic question is: what makes the truth
beautiful at the end? Even at the end,
Helen does not accept the young man as her son, still referring to him as her
nephew, thus continuing the protective lie she has perpetuated throughout the
story. The irony, however, lies in the
fact that Helen's heroism depends precisely on this concealment, for it is
obviously done not for her own sake, but for her child's.

Earlier in the story, when the boy wants to call
Helen "Mummy," and she allows him to do so as their secret only at bedtime,
she reveals the secret to her friends, telling the boy that it's always best to
tell the truth. His reply--"when
the troof's ugly I don't think it's nice"--constitutes a revealing irony
in the story about the nature of truth and its relationship to beauty. What the boy calls "ugly" is the
truth Helen tells that the boy calls her "Mummy" even though she is
not his mother. The truth that she is
his mother is however the beautiful truth that cannot be revealed within the
profane realm of everyday society, for that truth would indeed be ugly from
that profane point of view.

The death of the boy and his mysterious spontaneous
burial under the shelled foundation of a barn marks the psychic death of Helen
also, for in her double life, she truly has lived, like Mary Postgate, only for
her son. The resurrection of his body
marks a parallel resurrection for her as she makes her trip to visit the grave.
Mrs. Scarsworth is, as other critics have well noted, an embodiment of Helen's
split self and thus echoes her previous position. Mrs. Scarsworth tells Helen that she is tired
of lying. "When I don't tell lies
I've got to act 'em and I've got to think 'em always. You don't know what that
means." Helen of course knows precisely what that means, but even though she
is the one most able to directly sympathize with Mrs. Scarsworth, still she
cannot tell the truth, for that truth is ugly within the profane world.

However, what is ugly to the profane world is
finally revealed as beautiful within the realm of the sacred. Helen,
who is both Mary Magadelene, the fallen, and Mary the mother of Christ, goes to
find the grave of her son and savior and is directed to it by the ultimate
embodiment of the sacred. It seems
inevitable, in a story which deals with a double life-- the life of public
property and the life of private emotion--that the ultimate incarnation of
spirit within body in Western culture should be the means by which the secret
of spirit is revealed to the reader. The
secret revealed at the end of the story is the same as the one revealed when
Mary comes to look for the body of Christ--that is, that he is not here, but
has arisen--that is, that he is not body but spirit. The true reality of the
story is the reality of the sacred and always hidden world, which is sacred
precisely because of its hidden nature.

As is usually the case in short fiction, it is the
world of spirit, the world of the sacred that constitutes the truth, and that truth, regardless of what it
appears to be within the profane framework, is always beautiful. It is not so much that Kipling plays a
supernatural trick at the end of the story, but rather that he needs an
ultimate embodiment of spirit within body to communicate the ironic reversal of
the apparent lie being the most profound truth.
The not-told of the short story is more important than what is told, for
what cannot be told directly always constitutes the ideal nature of story
itself.

Monday, May 25, 2015

It is no coincidence that Robert Louis Stevenson,
the first British writer to be recognized as a specialist in the short story,
is also the champion of the romance form in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. Nor is it accidental that
Stevenson's interest in the short-story made him one of the first British
short-fiction writers to focus, as did Henry James, on technique and form
rather than on content. Both Lionel
Stevenson and Walter Allen say that the watershed for the modern short story
began in l878 with the publication of Stevenson's "A Lodging for the
Night," with Allen going so far as to claim that the change to the
specifically modern short story can be precisely dated at that point.

Other critics
and historians of the British short story, such as T. O. Beachcroft and Wendell
Harris agree that Stevenson's stories mark a true departure from previous
British short fiction and thus signal the beginning of the modern art of the
short story. However, with the exception of noting that Stevenson created a
tightly woven, well-made tale, critics have made little effort to explain
Stevenson's innovation and how it initiated the "golden age" of
British short fiction in the nineties.

In his essay, "A Gossip on Romance"
(l882), Stevenson makes it clear that he wished to return to the well-springs
of story, that is, to story for the sake of story, rather than story for the
sake of character and conversation--the usual focus of the nineteenth-century
novel. It is not for eloquence or
thought that the reader comes to a story, says Stevenson, but rather for a
certain sort of incident. In order to
clarify the nature of the short story incident, he argues that whereas drama is
is a poetry of conduct, the romance is a poetry of circumstance, reflecting two
basic kinds of pleasure in life: the active and the passive. In the former, we feel in command of our
destiny, while in the latter we feel "lifted up by circumstance, as by a
breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the future."

Modern psychologists have argued that such a duality
between active and passive modes represent a breach between the so-called
active adult mode, which directs itself toward living in the real world, and
the so-called child-like mode, which is developed around a passive taking-in of
the environment.Many think that the
passive attitude is a primitive mode that focuses not on the phenomenal world,
but rather on the world as a product of the imagination.As Stevenson describes it, within this mode,
the imagination perceives the world not as an end in itself, but as an
opportunity for story; he notes, for example, how certain places fill one with
the notion either that something has happened here or else something must
happen here.The world becomes
transformed into the stimulus for some hidden meaning which it is the artist's
job to lay bare, a task he performs by developing some incident that seems
appropriate to the feeling and the place.Stevenson calls this demand for the fit and striking incident one of the
natural appetites, as deeply seated as the desire for knowledge; it is the
desire for the realization and apotheosis of the day-dream.

Stevenson says that although the stories of the
great creative writers may be nourished with the realities of life, "their
true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the
ideal laws of the day-dream." This
focus on the transformation of ideal laws of the imagination into an as-if real
incident leads Stevenson to understand story in much the way that Poe and Henry
James did; that is, that fiction
objectifies the basic human desire that life have the unity and meaning
of narrative and that all circumstances in a narrative must come together like
a painting. As Stevenson says, "the
threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the
web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or
to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration."

Stevenson knew that English readers in the latter
part of the l880s were "apt to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve
their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the
curate," as if indeed such detail of everyday life constituted the only
reality. However, there is another
reality, says Stevenson, the reality of imagination and play; and indeed,
argues Stevenson, fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child. Such a point of view was not particularly
palatable to the temperament of the late nineteenth-century British reader, who
insisted that there must either moral earnestness or else minute realistic
detail in fiction for it to have any value.

Stevenson
continued his discussion on the nature of narrative in l884 when he joined his
own voice to the debate about the art of fiction then going on between Walter
Besant and Henry James. Taking the side
of James, Stevenson insisted that technique rather than content was the basis
for narrative as an art form, suggesting a notion that has since been developed
to significant theoretical lengths by the Russian Formalist critics of the
l920s--that is, if we wish to understand the secret of art, we must not focus
on its similarities to external reality, but rather on its basic differences--the
distance from life that technique and form create. The whole secret, says Stevenson, is that art
works do not compete with life, but rather like "arithmetic and geometry,
turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet,
and regard instead a certain figmentary abstraction."

Narrative flees from external reality and pursues
"an independent and creative aim," urges Stevenson. "So far as it imitates at all, it
imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the emphasis
and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them." Stevenson
makes an important point here, for he suggests that story telling actually
imitates story telling--that its source is in language, the narrative impulse,
and what it depicts is not reality but the perception of reality made by one in
the process of making a story. For
Stevenson the work of art exists then not by its resemblance to life, "but
by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and significant,
and is both the method and the meaning of the work." Such a self-conscious awareness that story,
while bound to incident, is the formal embodiment of daydream and the process
of story itself, was essential before the "modern short story" could
become possible in the nineteenth century.

"A Lodging for the Night" is a strange
candidate for a landmark story that marks the shift to modern short
fiction. Although it is highly detailed
and focuses on a specific time-limited situation, it poses more questions about
its generic status than clear answers.
Walter Allen says the story is ultimately not satisfying, for it depends
too much on being a story about Francis Villon and thus does not exist
aesthetically in its own right. And T. O. Beachcroft says that the two levels
of truth in the story--fact and fiction--interfere with each other. Critics who
have taken the story as fiction, such as Joseph Egan, see it as being an
embodiment of an irony between Villon's position as a poet and as a man. Eagan says the story is a "vivid
chronicle of the inevitable tragedy of a soul that, endowed though it is with
the loftiest powers of mind and imagination, so gravely lacks fidelity to
principles of human decency that the gifts are perverted; and instead of life
and growth, their fruit is self-injury and self-degradation."

There is no doubt that "A Lodging for the
Night" is filled with hate and horror, but the interesting question is why
it is not a hateful and horrifying story overall. The key to this irony is the character of
Villon himself and his basic situation.
Although the reader may have a conventional expectation that a poet's
life should not be focused on practical existence, the structure of the story
challenges this expectation. The basic
irony of the story is that it is a tale about a poet whose primary concern is
practical existence. When Villon reacts
according to the reader's conventional expectation of a poet, that is, with
sympathetic emotion, he gets his pockets picked. As the narrator of the story suggests,
"In many ways, an artistic nature unfits a man for practical
existence."

A central
question of the story is: in what way does Villon represent an artistic
nature? One might legitimately wonder
what is the point of a story about an artist who does not act like an
artist. This question raises the central
issue of the story, that is, the challenge to our conventional expectation of
what an artistic nature actually is. To
examine this issue, one need not go outside the story to refer to the life of
the real Villon, except to note that Stevenson chose him because of his known
vagabond existence. Such a figure offers
Stevenson the opportunity to examine in a single incident the hypothesis that
an artist's focus on survival has nothing to do with his art.

Villon's only concern in the tale is with life and
therefore inevitably with death.
However, in the beginning of the story, he mocks death by mocking the
sound of the wind blowing through the gibbet as he jokes that they are
"all dancing the devil's jig on nothing up there." After one of the men has been stabbed, Villon
breaks into hysterical laughter, "laughing bitterly, as though he would
shake himself to pieces." He then
says they will all be hanged and puts out his tongue and throws his head to one
side to counterfeit the appearances of one who has been hanged. After he leaves and tries to find some
shelter from the cold and the patrol, he stumbles over something both hard and
soft, firm and loose, and gives a little laugh when he discovers it is the body
of a dead prostitute. He indeed makes an
emotional response to this discovery later, but only after he takes the two
coins from her stocking and wonders at the "dark and pitiable mystery"
that she should have died before she spent the money. Villon himself thinks, "He would like to
use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern
broken."

Villon
goes to his spiritual father but is driven away; he goes to his physical mother
and has slop dumped on him. After the
first rebuff, the humor of the situation strikes him and he laughs. After his mother rebuffs him, he thinks of
taking a lodging and being fed many favorite delicacies. When he thinks of "roast fish"--the
subject of the ballad he had been writing when the murder took place--the
phrase fills him with "an odd mixture of amusement and horror." Indeed this combination might well summarize
the mood of the story itself, for in a strange way it fills the reader with
just the same mixture.

When Villon enters the house of the old soldier, the
ambiguous mixture of amusement and horror becomes more obvious. Whereas the old man takes their little debate
seriously, Villon primarily uses it to stall, to allow more time for protection
from the cold and to eat and drink the old man's food. Point by point, Villon gets the old man to
admit that in many ways there is no difference between a soldier and a thief,
except that the soldier is a greater thief because he is allowed to take
more. Villon becomes quite comfortable
as the old man cannot decide to drive him out or to convert him. He admits there is something more than he can
understand in all of Villon's talk, but that he is convinced that Villon is one
who has lost his way and made an error in life.
"You are attending to the little wants, and you have totally
forgotten the great and only real ones.... For such things as honor and love
and faith are not only nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think we desire
them more, and suffer more sharply for their absence." Villon then delivers his own little sermon
about his honor which he says he keeps in a box until it is needed. He notes that he has had the opportunity of killing
and robbing the old man but has resisted out of a sense of honor. When the old man throws him out, Villon goes
out to meet the dawn, having indeed found a lodging for the night, thinking:
"A very dull old gentleman.... I wonder what his goblets may be
worth."

The secret of the story's ambiguous mixture of
horror and amusement depends solely on the nature of the poet Villon, who
alternates between attending to the immediate concerns of life to assure his
own preservation and taking an amused and distant view of reality which
indicates his own broad view of life.
Villon survives not only because of his concern with immediate things,
but also because he can take such an ironic view of life and death; this is
what allows him to continue and not give in to despair. The murdered man and the dead prostitute take
on a curious unreality to him, except for such details as the man's red hair
and the prostitute's two unspent coins.
Otherwise they do not impinge on Villon except to remind him that he may
meet the same fate unless he finds lodging for the night. The final irony is of course that it is his
scholarly and poetic nature which saves him, for only by engaging in debate
with the old man is he allowed to stay in safety until dawn. Thus the two basic
elements of the story--artistic nature and practical existence--are not so much
incompatible as they at first seem.
Indeed, it is both Villon's poetic nature and his concern for immediate
survival which save him. The secret of
the poetic nature lies in its ability to distance itself from life and death,
to mock it and scorn it, to transform it into the source of art.

It is Stevenson's acute self-consciousness of the
significance of structure and the problem of presenting psychic reality as if
it were externally manifested that makes critics refer to him as the first
"modern" short-story writer in British fiction. However, Stevenson does not represent a new
departure for the English short story; rather, he embodies a movement toward
the laying bare of the conventions that have dominated the form since its
beginnings.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

It is one thing to discuss the naturalism of
Theodore Drieser and Jack London in their characteristic novels. However, when one turns to their canonized
short stories, "The Lost Phoebe" and "To Build a Fire,"
mere naturalism alone is not sufficient to account for their staying
power. "Lost Phoebe" opens
with description of old, broken, worn-out things in the house; the loom on
which the rug was woven is a "bony skeleton." The orchard is full of gnarled apple trees,
worm eaten and covered with lichens, "so that it had a sad greenish-white,
silvery effect in the moonlight." The old couple is described similarly;
simple natures 'that fasten themselves like lichens on the stones of
circumstances and weather their days to a crumbling conclusion." Henry
Reifsneider and his wife Phoebe Ann. She sickens and dies and after five months
of living alone "a change began."

Everything is disordered and it is all a terror to
him.. Sometimes the moonlight in the
kitchen and a certain combination of furniture, a chair with his coat on it,
gave him an exact representation of Phoebe.
He wonders if it is a ghost (this is the Hawthorne neutral territory
metaphor) Wisps of mist in the yard
almost make him think he sees her. he
drams of her and thinks he sees her moving in bedroom. He gets the obsession that she is not
dead. Dreiser says with the aged and
feeble it is not a far cry from "the subtleties of illusion to actual
hallucination." "His mind had
gone.

In its place
was a fixed illusion." He goes from house to house to look for her; people
are sympathetic. He remembers that one
day she said she would leave him. He now
believes that she has over a little spat.
People don't have him put away because of the poor condition of the
institutions for the insane. After being
rebuffed many times, he takes to hollering for her. "The process by which a character
assumes the significance of being peculiar, his antics weird, yet harmless, in
such a community is often involute and pathetic." (He becomes a character;
note how Sherwood Anderson deals with this)
In trying to determine which way to go at a crossroads, he has another
hallucination, that Phoebe's spirit tells him which way by throwing his cane;
sometimes when it points to the way he has come, he shakes his head philosophically,
as if contemplating the unbelievable or an untoward fate..." He becomes famous.

Seven years he does this and one night in the
vicinity of the Red Cliff, brought there by his cane. He sees w will of the wisp, fluttering bog
fires bobbing gracefully among the trees; moonlight an shadows combined to give
it a strange form and a stranger reality. He sees her as a gayer younger Phoebe
as he knew her when she was a girl. He
sees her across the cliff among a silvery bed of apple trees blooming in the
spring. "and feeling the lure of a
world when love was young and Phoebe, as this vision presented her, a
delightful epitome of their quondam youth, he gave a gay cry of 'Oh, wait,
Phoebe!' and leaped." He is found broken but elated, a smile of peace on
delight on his lips. "No one of all
the simple population knew how eagerly and joyously he had found his lost
mate."

The basic critical fallacy of the various
interpretations of Jack London's "to Build a Fire," claiming for it
the status of mythic archetype or classical tragedy, is that the critics insist
that the man's death has significance not because of any significance
attributed to that death within the story, but rather because of the
significance of death in the critical categories they have applied to the
story. The man's death is significant
because it symbolizes the frailty of unaccommodated man against cosmic forces,
because it leads to psychic rebirth, because it is the tragic result of a
tragic flaw and is confronted with "dignity." The "simple fact" of death is
nothing but a simple fact if nothing is at stake but the "mere" loss
of biological life, if the character who dies is nothing but a physical body
killed to illustrate this "simple fact."

For Jack London, and consequently for the reader,
the man in the story is simply a living body and cold is simply a physical
fact. To insist that the story is a
symbolic dramatization adumbrated in a symbolic polarity between fire as life
and cold as death is to run the risk of saying that the symbolic protagonist's
symbolic failure to build the symbolic fire results in his symbolic death. Of course, such a statement is true in the
sense that every art work can be said to "symbolize" or "mediate"
a reality that is not identical with the verbal construct of the work
itself. But such a statement tells us
nothing about Jack London's story.
Surely Labor and Hendricks realize that both Frank O'Connor and Pascal
in their references to human loneliness and the terror of infinite spaces meant
something more than the simple fear of being physically alone or losing
physical life.

London's central comment about the protagonist in
the story itself clearly indicates the "naturalistic" nature of his
Everyman: "The trouble with him was
that he was without imagination. He was
quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the
significances." London says that
the cold was a simple fact for the man.
"It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of
temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within
certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there it did not lead him to
the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the
universe." If this comment
"hardly ripples in the reader's consciousness," as Labor and
Hendricks suggest, it is not because it is dropped so "deftly," but
rather because London, like his protagonist, is without imagination in this
story, because he too is concerned here only with the things of life and not
with their significance. The reader may be led to meditate upon the physical
limits of man's ability to live in extreme cold, but nothing in the story leads
him to the metaphysical conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the
universe.

A close look at the story itself without the lenses
of a priori categories reveals that the most significant repetitive motif
London uses to chart the man's progressive movement toward death is the gradual
loss of contact between the life force of the body and the parts of the
body: "The cold of space smote the
unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received
the full force of the blow. The blood of
his body recoiled before it. The blood
was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover
itself up from the fearful cold... The
extremities were the first to feel its absence." The man realizes this more forcibly when he
finds it difficult to use his fingers:
"they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had to look and
see whether or not he had hold of it."
The separation is further emphasized when he burns the flesh of his
hands without feeling the pain and when he stands and must look down to see if
he is really standing. When he realizes
that he is physically unable to kill the dog, he is surprised to find that he
must use his eyes to find out where his hands are.

Finally, realizing that the frozen portions of this
body are extending, he has a vision of himself that the story has been moving
toward, a vision of the self as totally frozen body, not only without psychic
life, but without physical life as well.
Picturing the boys finding his body the next day, "he found himself
with them, coming along the trail and looking for himself. And, still with them, he came around a turn
in the trail and found himself lying in the snow. He did not belong with himself any more, for
even then he was out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself
in the snow." The discovery of self
in London's story is not the significant
psychic discovery of Oedipus or the Ancient Mariner, but rather the simple
physical discovery that the self is body only.

Anyone who sees this purely physical fiction as a
story with metaphysical significance does so not as a result of the imagination
of Jack London, but as a result of the imagination of his critics. One can grant that the bare situation of the
story has metaphysical potential without granting that London actualizes it,
gives it validity. It is possible that
the great white silence in the story could have had the significance it has in
Moby Dick, that the cold of space could have had the significance it has in
Crane's "The Blue Hotel," that the nothingness that kills the man
could have had the significance it has in "Bartleby the Scrivner" or
Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."

It is even possible that the obsessive
concern with immediate detail could have had the significance it has in
"Big Two-Hearted River." But
without going into what makes such elements metaphysically significant in these
true "masterpieces," it is sufficient to say that there is more in
the context of these works to encourage such symbolic readings than in London's
"To Build a Fire."

Reality of Artifice

New Short Story Theories

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."